Mat-Su College: Writing

There are many online tools that might make citing sources easier for you. This page introduces some of them.

Most databases have a simple way to generate a citation for an article you're looking at.

Generally, you'll want to look around for a button that says "Cite."

Here's how it looks in Academic Search Premier and other EBSCOHost databases.

First, in your search results, click on the title of the article you want to cite. In the detailed record for that article, click the button that says "Cite":

Likewise in a ProQuest database -- click the title of an article then look for the "Cite" button:

ZoteroBib is a free (and ad-free), simple website that helps you generate citations. It's useful when you found an article in a database that won't easily generate a citation, or you have an article but don't want to go through the process of finding it in a database just to generate a citation there.

There are two ways to generate a citation in ZoteroBib: 

1. Sometimes you can just type the title of the article and get a pre-made citation.
2. Otherwise you can click "Manual entry" and enter pieces of information such as the article's title and the author's name. This is still easier than creating the citation totally from scratch since all of the formatting rules will be applied for you.

The same people who make ZoteroBib make a powerful, but still free program called Zotero. It can be used to create and store all of your citations. Zotero (and other citation managers) can be overkill if you are looking to quickly cite a few sources to use in one papers. But if you have a full-blown research project, or want to keep track citations to be used in several papers or classes, Zotero is a great tool.

Read my Zotero guide for more information.